Recommended reading: The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, William Morrow and Company, New York, 1985. 784 pages.Dave Smith and David Bottoms have selected poems written by American poets born between 1940 and 1955 for this volume. After a nice preface titled 'The Anthology in Our Heads' by the editors, and a nice Introduction by Anthony Hecht, you can find poems by Ai, David Bottoms, Stephen Dobyns, Rita Dove, Norman Dubie, Carolyn Forche, Tess Gallagher, Reginald Gibbons, Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, Marilyn Hacker, Daniel Halpern, Robert Hass, William Heyen, Edward Hirsch, Yusef Komunyakaa, William Logan, Heather McHugh, William Matthews, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Gregory Orr, Robert Pinsky, Katha Pollitt, Alberto Rios, Sherod Santos, Dave Smith, Gary Soto and Richard Tillinghast, among others.
I bought this book in 1988 when I was an undergraduate at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. The book was required for a poetry class I enrolled in. As I recall, we didn't do much with the book during the course. I kept the book though. I love the colors on the cover, and the book has poems by beginning poets. More than once, I've made time every day to read one poem and to write comments on it in the margins. I always try to find two things to write that are positive and one thing to write about how the poem might be improved. In the twenty years since I bought the book, I've commented on poems from the beginning of the anthology up to page 215.
-- "It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."
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